My Five #15

My Five: Five things worth sharing from the last week (or so), brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.

This week’s My Five is by Katie.

1. Raven Tools drops rank checking

It was announced last Friday that Raven Tools is due to drop its rank checking tool. Following a failed Google Adwords audit, Raven was told that it was out of compliance with Google’s terms of service, and ordered to stop its data scraping.

Sound familiar? It wasn’t too long ago that SEOMoz announced that its access to the Google Adwords API had been revoked. Speculation suggests that it was for the same reasons.

With Google increasing the enforcement of its terms of service, all SEO software companies will soon have a difficult choice to make: continue to offer scraped data and risk losing Adwords API access; or comply with Google’s terms of service and follow in the steps of Raven Tools.

2. 2012 on Twitter

2012 is drawing to a close, and there’s been a lot to tweet about. Twitter has released a look back at the most discussed events of the year, with President Obama’s ‘Four More Years’ victory tweet claiming the title of not only the most re-tweeted post of the year, but also the most re-tweeted post ever. Impressive stuff.

The second most re-tweeted message came from Justin Bieber… The power of the ‘tween’ market is incredible – it wouldn’t surprise me if next year, due to popular demand, the members of One Direction replace the major world leaders and lead us into a new era of jumping about enthusiastically.

The London 2012 Olympics was the subject of over 150 million tweets, with the Spice Girls performance at the closing ceremony causing the largest ‘games related’ spike with 116,000 plus tweets per minute.

Of all the amazing things that happened at the London 2012 games, it looks as though Geri Halliwell ‘singing’ on the top of a black cab tops the list.

3. SEOMoz one step closer to Global Domination

Last Tuesday SEOMoz announced that it had acquired GetListed. Apparently in the pipeline since 2011, SEOMoz plan to use this to help local small businesses to optimise their online presence on search engines, and even plan to develop a mobile app and web based software.

Already holding the listings of over 2 million local businesses, GetListed reportedly cost SEOMoz a whole bunch of stock and cash worth in the region of $3 million. Someone’s going to have a very merry Christmas this year!

4. Smartphone or a desktop?

The most important (and miraculous) thing that happened to me this week was the installation of the internet at my house. After nearly four months of using just my phone for internet (more about that here), I’m very glad to finally be able to get back on my laptop, which for me, its much easier for browsing the internet.

And it appears I’m not alone, as statistics were published this week by the Direct Marketing Association, revealing that even though more than half of all mobile phone users own a smartphone, 60% of these people prefer to use a desktop computer to discover new brands, products and services.

5. Someone’s been busy at Amazon

Someone in Amazon’s e-marketing team has been busy dreaming up a (slightly too frequent) email campaign. The emails consist of ‘you have previously bought…. you might also like….’ type suggestions, which I think is actually quite brilliant.

In a recent email, Amazon told me that I had previously purchased ‘The Art Of SEO’ and a jumper suitable for a small dog. They then suggested other SEO related books and small dog outfits.

Apologies are now in order to my Mother-in-law’s Chihuahua who will be dressed as an elf (again) this Christmas, and to my husband, who hates reading and uses the stack of books about SEO I keep buying for him as a shelf for his alarm clock.